Just Sit in the Dirt and be Silent
Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this adversity that had come upon him, each one came from his own place—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. For they had made an appointment together to come and mourn with him, and to comfort him. And when they raised their eyes from afar, and did not recognize him, they lifted their voices and wept; and each one tore his robe and sprinkled dust on his head toward heaven. So they sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great. Job 2:11-13
Riley is my workout water break buddy.
Every morning, when I leave my bedroom at 5 am and head downstairs to Bring It, I turn the door knob slllowwlllyyy. I descend the stairs with a prayer that my noisy knees won’t give me away and inadvertently step on a loose floor joist. I hear a gasp from Riley’s room at the top of the stairs. Not a “who woke me up” gasp or a “hey–I’m trying to sleep” sigh, but an “oh no! I meant to wake up” sound, like the sound I make if I forget to set my alarm clock and I realize I’m late for something. Then I hear baboomboomboom—-muffled scrambling, and her door flies open and hits the wall before I get halfway down the stairs. She bounds out, and then she has to hold on to the post at the bottom of the stairs, blinking, until the fog clears and she figures out where she is and why she’s there. Before I can get my water glass filled, she is in the garage collecting whatever I need for the workout I happen to be doing that day, and she never forgets which one it’s supposed to be. She comes in toting my hand weights, my pull up bar, my exercise mat. She puts the DVD in the machine and then fills up her own water glass. You’d think, if you were here, that she intends to exercise. But you’d be wrong. As soon as I start warming up, she goes and gets a blanket from her room, a favorite pillow, a book. She settles in on the couch, and she waits.
Just about the time I am pushing myself beyond the muscle burn (coaching myself–Come on, bring it!), she asks me a random question. “Moomm, where does the he tooth fairy live?”—- That’s another story: I have always told her that Kevin and I play tooth fairy when she loses a tooth, but she doesn’t believe me. Once when Kevin was sick, we forgot to retrieve her tooth. I apologized the next day and joked that we “tooth fairies” forgot because the he “tooth fairy” was sick. Chuckling (she was giggling, so I thought we were on the same page), I told her the she tooth fairy would come the next night. For the next three weeks, she asked me why the he tooth fairy was sick and if he’d be getting better any time soon. I reminded her that the he tooth fairy was Daddy and pointed out that he was already much better. She laughed this “You’re silly, Mommy” laugh and asked me again the next day.—-So, when I told her, sweating profusely and I admit, impatiently, that the he tooth fairy lived here because he was Daddy, she bent over double laughing. “The TOOTH fairy is Daddy! You’re silly, Mom!” (laughing laughing laughing….pause) “So, how old is the he tooth fairy? And…he’s a daddy?”
I keep trying to convince her to try a few of the exercises…or better yet, to wait until I’m finished and do the kid exercise DVD I got at her request several months ago. She could use the aerobic activity. She always says something like, “I will, but I just want to watch you exercise.” So she lays on the couch. And even though this exercise is a self-appointed discipline, I envy her position beneath the blankets, cuddled up in her pjs. Every so often, while I’m trying to do something impossible like bend myself backward into a wheel, she’ll jump up, position herself somewhere in my blind spot and say, “Look, Mom! You do it like this.” In the half a dozen times I’ve actually given up and turned to look, I’ve found her poised like a flamingo or an odd, ruffle-headed duck, grinning wildly. Then she runs back to the couch.
She’s all in for those water breaks, though. The minute they say, “let’s take 30 seconds to get some water and towel off,” she hops up off the couch and takes a good long gulp from her water bottle. Then, when I am poised in a wall squat and my legs are about to shake right off my body, she’ll say, “Moomm, how old is Veronica (Veronica being the red-headed lady on the exercise dvd)?” I think the yoga workout is her least favorite because the water break doesn’t come until the end. About half way through, she’ll say, “Moomm, I…umm…I think the water break will be soon. I think it will be.” She lives for those water breaks.
Until Riley started exercising water breaking with me, I never realized how much concentration it takes to hold a side arm balance or crunch out three more push ups. It is extremely. hard. to. bring. it. and. answer. random. questions. And ignoring her doesn’t work. She’s persistent. And I am a very expressive exerciser. So sometimes I clinch my teeth and talk to her in quick spurts out the side of my mouth. And Zoe wanders downstairs in the middle of all this and wrinkles up her nose and says, “Uh, Mom, are you okay?” And now, I tell Kevin, my workouts are toning body and mind.:)
I’ve been wondering for a while what could be so exciting about the water breaks that my daughter forces herself to get up just so she can participate in them. Then recently my mom pointed out something I’ve thought about off and on since Riley and I embarked on this new road to adolescence: She just needs time with me, in whatever way she can find it. I remember that at Riley’s age, I shadowed my mom constantly. I didn’t really know why I felt that I needed her so badly, but I just had to be with her. Some odd, gnawing anxiety that I didn’t really understand just propelled me to find shelter next to her. So, despite the fact that it’s too early to want to be awake and it’s incredibly difficult to figure out what to say to start up a conversation surrounding an exercise DVD, Riley is there with me almost every morning, holding on to the banister till the fog clears and she can help me gather my stuff. She wouldn’t miss it. She’s disappointed if I miss it. And again God uses my child to remind me of something significant: Sometimes just being with those we love, no matter what they are doing or going through, is the most important thing.
When I was twelve years old, my PaPa died after what felt to me like a very short battle with cancer. He lived the last weeks of his life in my brother Scott’s bedroom, which was a part of our garage my dad had converted into a pretty nice room with wood paneling and carpet. Looking back, I can just imagine how difficult that time was for my mom, who in the midst of raising two teenage boys and a preteen daughter, managing her home, and working with my dad full time, rode back and forth with her daddy for his chemotherapy. When things were at their worst, she’d push down all the seats in the wagon and do her best to make a soft place for him to lay, and she’d ride back there with him while my dad drove over the bridges and through the narrow streets in downtown Charleston to the hospital, my grandma next to him in the front seat. I remember that in the end, I’d feel a sense of dread every time I had to go into PaPa’s room and talk to him. It was hard to walk in there and stare Suffering in the face, especially as it assaulted someone I loved so much. In fact, I’d often figure out reasons to stay away, just because I could neither bear the sight of his pain nor the reality of my grief. I was only 12. I didn’t really know what to do.
It occurs to me that sitting still in the presence of suffering will never be an easy thing. Just being there, watching someone I love battle something I cannot change, will always be excruciating. I’ve learned some lessons about this over the years though, and with their wonderful, powerful, unfiltered-love, my children remind me constantly of the things that are most important. Sometimes just being with someone I love, no matter what they’re doing or what they’re going through, is the most important thing.
God has made such progress with me, but I’ve had my turn with a million wrong reactions to the suffering of a friend. Once, when a friend lived in the deepest, darkest pit of depression I have ever witnessed, and she withdrew and appeared to be digging deeper and deeper into the pit and falling more and more silent and distant and numb, I lectured her about choices and made the symptoms of her pain all about me. “Why won’t you talk to me? Don’t you care about me? Isn’t our friendship important to you?” I’m thinking now that my questions felt a lot like the random ones Riley pings at me while I’m pushing myself to fitness. Working through her own grief consumed every ounce of energy and concentration she had, and turning her attention to me was both counterproductive and more overwhelming than I could imagine at the time.
A friend who struggled with the worst marriage I’ve seen would sit at my kitchen table and pour out completely emotional, and as a result completely illogical, arguments, epithets, and strategies regarding her own misery, and I would respond with logic and patronizing advice on a subject about which I had absolutely no point of reference. I would challenge her while handing her a tissue and laying a hand against her back.
When one friend never seemed to have a happy day for years, I once again used my 12-year-old strategy and simply avoided contact because I had run out of possible ways that I could in any way help her to find joy. My distance made her feel lonely.
And then, I studied Job. Job is perhaps the most profoundly sad book in all of scripture, but it’s also one of my favorites. Not only does it illuminate the issue of Suffering, it offers a glimpse of real life friends struggling with hard core pain. And I have realized that at one time or another, I have been Job’s friends. At first, they did exactly the right thing. They went together to see him, setting aside their time and their own lives. They were shattered with grief and shared Job’s pain with loud sobs when they saw that their friend was so tortured with physical and emotional loss that they could not even recognize him. Then they sat with him in the dirt and said nothing for an entire week, because they knew his grief was tremendous. Then Job, feeling safe enough to vent his pain before his friends with inadequate, emotional words, starts thinking aloud. May the day of my birth perish, and the night it was said, ‘A boy is born!’ That day—may it turn to darkness; may God above not care about it; may no light shine upon it. And then his friends, so like the rest of us floundering friends, make a very wrong move. They speak. They use logical arguments to try to persuade Job to do and say things he is unable to do and say. Their strategies and arguments, laughably, are similar to Riley’s attempts (having never done the exercises at all) to show me how to make my way through impossible yoga poses. They make the symptoms of his pain about them, speaking in fear about how their suffering does not and will not equal his because of their exemplary spirituality. And the more they talk, the deeper Job falls into despair. And things only get worse. Until God speaks. And He always does.
Recently, a few rare mornings have come and gone in which Riley’s body is just too tired to allow her to join me for my workouts. She sleeps so deeply that she misses the sound of my doorknob turning and my knees creaking, and by the time she gets up, the smell of coffee fills the room and I am writing a new schedule for the day on the dry erase board. While I will not deny that I’ve enjoyed “suffering” in silence, there are things I miss deeply when she sleeps in. I miss her presence. I miss seeing her right there in the room with me, hearing the pages of her book turn, and seeing her grin at me when I look her way. And I miss the sound of urgency when I pass her room and she is desperate just to be there with me. I miss her help. I miss having someone gather all of my supplies for me while I try to clear the thick fog that clutters my thoughts and gather my energy for the task at hand. I miss her participation in the only part in which she could possibly actually participate. I miss my exercise water break buddy. Because, let’s face it, she’s too young and uncoordinated to actually do the workouts. And motor planning…well, it doesn’t come easy.
I admit it: I do not do not do not! 🙂 miss her random questions or her unsolicited advice about how to do the exercises. Those are the things that make the workout 10x more challenging than it is already.
And it seems to me, that when I’m suffering, what I need most is just friends and loved ones who will be there…urgently, in an “OH! I meant to wake up! kind of way (I’m sure Peter, James, and John felt exactly that way that last night in the garden, with Jesus weeping nearby, when they just could. not. stay. awake.). I need them to just be there and be silent…for as long as it takes. And I need them to help, in little, every day ways until I can find my way through the darkness and the fog. I need them to gather all the supplies I’m gonna need to get through the day, the hour, the moment. And I need them to participate in every way but only the ways in which they actually can. There will be no solutions for them to offer. No way they can do the work for me. But sometimes, just being with the people you love, no matter what, is the most important thing.
One of God’s greatest gifts to me has been real, true, eleventh hour friends who know how to stay the course and just sit in the dirt with me and be silent. And I have hope, that in this season of my life, God has made me exactly the same kind of long-suffering friend. It’s the truest test of love. Because sometimes just sitting silently in the dirt with a suffering friend is the hardest thing to do.
